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Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

 
Who Bought $1.6B in Bitcoin Wednesday, and...
last week the cryptocurrency market persistently asked the gnawing and annoying question, “Why?” Specifically, why did someone make a massive purchase of $1.6 billion worth of bitcoin on Wednesday in a couple of minutes? While many see this huge buy as a signal of bullishness, there may be more complex answers when one zooms out and looks at the overall picture, one that involves capital markets beyond the relatively small world of crypto. Some of the clues about why...

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Bitcoin hits strongest level since May
  Bitcoin, in terms of market value, rose 4.6% to $53,859.6. It passed $50,000 mark for first time in four weeks on Tuesday.  Bitcoin fell below $50,000 in early September. Bitcoin hit its highest level since mid-May on Wednesday as bulls bid up the cryptocurrency after it breached the $50,000 mark in the previous session. The world’s largest cryptocurrency in terms of market value rose 4.6% to $53,859.6. It passed the $50,000 mark for the first time in four...

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk says U.S. government...
Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday said the U.S. government should steer clear of trying to regulate the crypto market. “It is not possible to, I think, destroy crypto, but it is possible for governments to slow down its advancement,” Musk said at the Code Conference in Beverly Hills, California. Musk was responding on stage to a question from New York Times columnist Kara Swisher. She asked whether the U.S. government should be involved in regulating the crypto space....

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Why have Elon Musk and Tesla suddenly...
Elon Musk has performed a sudden U-turn on bitcoin over concerns about its energy usage, and says his electric car firm Tesla will no longer accept the cryptocurrency as payment – but will his decision have an impact, and could Tesla turn to an alternative currency? Tesla bet big on bitcoin earlier this year with a $1.5 billion investment, and it paid off: Bloomberg estimates that the company made $1 billion on its purchase in the first quarter of...

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Mastercard rolls out new program
Mastercard unveiled on Tuesday a buy now, pay later (BNPL) program that will allow consumers to pay for online and in-store purchases through equal and interest-free installments. The Mastercard Installments program will be available in markets across the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, the company said. Mastercard says its Installments program builds on Mastercard’s investments in open banking that help deliver a simple and convenient experience for consumers, merchants and lenders. As an elective option for lenders,...

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Twitter will allow people to tip their...
Twitter will now allow people to tip their favorite content creators with bitcoin and will also launch a fund to pay some users who host audio chat rooms on its Spaces feature, the company said on Thursday. The company also said it will test new ways to help users have a safer experience on Twitter, such as warning when people are entering a “heated” conversation, or letting them leave tweet threads they no longer want to be part of....

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US sanctions cryptocurrency exchange over ties to...
The United States imposed sanctions Tuesday on cryptocurrency exchange SUEX for its ties to ransomware attackers, as Washington seeks to crack down on digital crime. The move comes after hacks and data breaches that have targeted a major US oil pipeline, a meatpacking company and the Microsoft Exchange email system, as well as ransomware attacks hitting various sectors. The US Treasury Department did not say if SUEX was implicated in any of those incidents, but noted that 40 percent...

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Robinhood testing crypto wallet, cryptocurrency transfer features
Robinhood Markets is testing new crypto wallet and cryptocurrency transfer features for its app which would allow customers to send and receive digital currencies such as bitcoin, Bloomberg News reported on Monday. A beta version of its iPhone app showed the company’s work on such features, the report said. There was also a hidden image showing a waitlist page for users signing up for a crypto wallet feature, the report added. A spokesperson for Robinhood declined to comment. The...

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TrueLayer nabs $130M at a $1B+ valuation...
Open banking — a disruptive technology that seeks to bypass the dominance of card networks and other traditional financial rails by letting banks open their systems directly to developers (and new services) by way of APIs — continues to gain ground in the world of financial services. As a mark of that traction, a startup playing a central role in open banking applications is announcing a big round of funding with a milestone valuation. TrueLayer, which provides technology for...

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Daily Crunch: European regulators share more privacy...
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for September 20, 2021. It is Disrupt week, everyone, and TechCrunch is buzzing. Kicking off tomorrow morning, Disrupt is set to be a pretty butt-kicking affair. Check the agenda here, speakers here, Battlefield companies here, and if you want to see your humble servant doing his first run (last run?)...

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Australian growth marketing agency Ammo helps startups...
When you are the founder of a young startup, it is always very hard to gauge the right amount of effort to dedicate to marketing. Botch it and you risk looking unprofessional. Hire a traditional agency and you might be wasting time and money. Australian growth marketing agency Ammo, in contrast, wants to make sure that its clients aren’t overinvesting nor underinvesting. Geared toward tech startups, it boasts that it has “supercharged the growth of over 200 innovative businesses,”...

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Freshworks’ valuation could crest $10B in upcoming...
Earlier today, TechCrunch examined the new IPO price range for Toast. The U.S. software-and-fintech company moved its valuation materially higher in anticipation of pricing tomorrow after the bell and trading on Wednesday. It was not alone in doing so. Freshworks is also targeting a higher IPO price range, it disclosed today in a fresh SEC filing. The customer-service-focused software firm now expects to charge between $32 and $34 per share in its debut, up from the $28 to $32...

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Toast raises IPO price range, providing a...
U.S. technology unicorn Toast filed a new S-1 document this morning detailing a higher IPO price range for its shares. The more expensive range indicates that Toast may be worth more in its debut than it initially expected, a bullish sign for technology companies more broadly. Toast’s rising valuation may provide a boon to two different subsectors of technology: software and fintech. The restaurant-focused Toast sells software on a recurring basis (SaaS) to restaurants while also providing financial technology...

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Following SEC lawsuit threat, Coinbase cancels launch...
Coinbase efforts to play hardball with the Securities and Exchange Commission didn’t last too long. The cryptocurrency exchange had garnered the ire of the regulatory commission over its plans to launch a crypto lending product, with the SEC sending the company a Wells notice which indicated that the agency would sue Coinbase if they launched their crypto lending product called Lend. Less than a couple weeks after publishing a defiant blog post titled “The SEC has told us it...

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Airwallex raises $200M at a $4B valuation...
Business, now more than ever before, is going digital, and today a startup that’s building a vertically integrated solution to meet business banking needs is announcing a big round of funding to tap into the opportunity. Airwallex — which provides business banking services both directly to businesses themselves, as well as via a set of APIs that power other companies’ fintech products — has raised $200 million, a Series E round of funding that values the Australian startup at...

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